Monthly Archives: September 2014

Post navigation

Some excellent tips on how to improve your battery life in iOS8. It might also have the added bonus of allowing you to get to know your privacy settings and what app has access to what data…Just sayin’.

This is a handy dandy chart from Google about how to stay safe online. However, many of these points require some mediation with students. I am thinking of using it as a guideline for some of my Digital Citizenship workshops….

The Internet can be a scary place. There are people on the web who are looking to take advantage of you for their own personal gain. There. I said it. These people are likely looking to confuse or convince you that they are someone you should be sharing important information with. In an effort to …

If you have updated to iOS8, you will have no doubt come across the push notification asking you to turn on home sharing. What is this you, might ask yourself? I know I did. Could it be a better, more streamlined way of sharing apps, etc. with your family? Dare I believe it?

YES! Yes, that is exactly what it is! Along with some awesome features like a family calendar (OMG, I am so excited about this one, I am levitating while hugging my iPad! Okay. Not really). But seriously, this is super exciting! I have resorted to a google calendar for each kid and adult in our family and then have shared it with everyone just to have it completely ignored. No longer!

A question I had after reading the article below was whether kids can still purchase tmusic, etc. on their devices with their own iTunes account. This is important to me as a mother of two teenagers, who tend to get a lot of iTunes gift cards as gifts. (and also because mostly I don’t want their music. The exception being Lorde and Lana Del Rey (don’t judge me- it might be a midlife crisis.) Now I can finally get my hands on those albums!

The answer is YES! According to this hand dandy apple support article,

Content downloaded from family members or acquired via redemption codes is not subject to Ask to Buy.

Oh good. This will also change some info on our school’s iPad FAQs page as now homesharing is so much easier. Thanks Apple!

iPhones, iPod touches, iPads everywhere — everyone in the family has devices and uses them for everything. One of iOS 8’s key improvements is more convenient family sharing. This is what it is and how it works. Easier media sharing and better parental control You’ve been able to share media content with other members of your family for quite some time thanks to Apple’s Home…

At the moment, Ms. Jackson, English Teacher Extraordinaire, and I are developing a project to accompany the Grade 9 reading of The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak (if you haven’t read this book- you should.It is the best YA around).

The mission is to give them some background info on World War II so that they can put the novel in context.

The first part of the project they are already tackling: I have developed some questions on different aspects of the war (mainly culled from the Encyclopedia Britannica). They have to answer these questions.

The second part is to create an info graphic, or a data visualization for their answers. I wanted to give them some best practices as well as tools they could use for this and, of course, I had to look no further than Silvia Rosenthal Tolisano at Langwitches. Below is her amazingly thorough guide to creating infographics which I am going to be shamelessly using as a reference for my own presentation.

THANK YOU MS. TOLISANO! YOU ARE AWESOME!

I have been mesmerized by Infographics for a while now. Take a look at my previously written posts. Infographics- What? Why? How? Visual Thinking and Learning in the Classroom What are infographics…

This is a very intriguing article about Lagacé’s Facebook friend that turned out to be a fake. Actually, my first reaction is to feel sort of sad for this person, who by all accounts cultivated a very funny, vivacious persona and who hid his/her real self behind the figure of a pretty woman from Georgia.

But people don’t like to be lied to and even in the days of Anonymous, Avatars and Virtual relationships, we still want people to be who they say they are.

I am being very meta right now by curating Lisa Johnson’s curation of handy dandy articles giving you many iOS8 tips. From privacy settings to “where did my camera roll go?” These articles cover all you need to know about your new operating system- Thanks Lisa!

Tips, Resources, and Best Practices for making the most out of #iOS8 and Updating like a Pirate 😉